The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Charlotte took a dignified swatch of time to ponder her father’s sneak attack—a huge bite, a long chew, two savored mouthfuls of the Outback wine. Then she went for the giant shoulder bag she’d left in the hall, sat back in the wing chair, and searched her possessions. What she found was a letter.

  Or an envelope—long, white, no stamp, though it did bear Charlotte’s full name in a script Mabry thought he knew. Frances’s hand, no more than two or three days from the end. Oh Christ, please don’t make me read something new from those ghastly days. Or nights. The days were at least not scary, only flat-out tragic. So he actually leaned toward Charlotte—he still hadn’t eaten and wondered if he could now—and said “It might be better if you just summarized. Or kept any really hard parts to yourself. For now at least. I’m way too weak still to face that time again.”

  Charlotte gave the request a slow moment’s thought. Then she halfway smiled and held up a stalling hand. Trust me here. She took out a single page and spread it on her knee as gently as if this were even more precious than the last words of Gandhi or the Buddha’s last sutra. When she looked up a last time before her reading, she said “I want you to hear this from me, not read it yourself. But I’m not sure I won’t break down.”

  This girl is as likely to sob as I am to spread gold-dusted wings and soar toward Newark. She’d stayed dry as Tangier, right through the funeral. But he smiled to help her onward.

  She found the passage, toward the end of the page; and within three words, and without trying, she sounded uncannily like her mother. “‘It was badly wrong, that I ever told you any of the grief I held against your dad. If you ever do marry, or live with anybody more talkative than a German police dog, I trust you’ll learn this thing I’ve only learned now, too late. Unless your partner is a psychotic killer, any mistakes that drive you apart are no-fault wrecks . No human being can truly assign blame, not truly and fairly, unless one of them is harming children. Stop trying right now to punish your father.’” Charlotte’s voice had lasted. But she waited a good while, then held up the page. It was in a strong script, that had never been her mother’s.

  Quietly, Mabry said “Did you compose it?”

  Charlotte had skin that could blush in an instant, and now it fired up, but she held her own against it. “No, Pa. It’s not me. Surely you know I couldn’t have managed anything that sane.”

  Mabry said “Oh girl, you got me wrong. Without my glasses I was only wondering if you’d been her secretary—did she dictate it to you? I wrote down a good many things myself in those days when she’d get an idea that she thought was important. She even dictated whole wills to me, some of them so convincing that I phoned her lawyer and asked if they had any standing in law. He assured me of what I already knew—that she had a fixed will already, and that anyhow you had full power of attorney by then.”

  Charlotte said “The handwriting here is from that good night-nurse with auburn hair.”

  “Adelaide Truesdale, a certified saint.”

  “Believe me now then?”

  “Darling, I never disbelieved you. But it’s useful to know that your mother truly said it.”

  Charlotte said “I agree Adelaide sports a genuine hundred-watt halo, but I doubt she could manufacture that much truth entirely on her own.”

  Mabry started on his dinner. When he’d swallowed the first taste (precisely as rare as he’d ordered it), and watched Charlotte fold the page and return it to her bag, he said “Would you kindly bring me a copy of that when you get the next chance?”

  Charlotte said “Of course,” then swallowed some wine. “And that means you now know what cheered me up—or made me less of a moral policeman than I’ve tried to be about what you did that ended yall’s marriage.”

  Mabry noted the yall, realizing how he’d caused it. “I see it, yes ma’m; and I’m grateful for it—your mother made Adelaide look like a hooker when it came to goodness—but if you’d truly heard what she said, you wouldn’t have just said I ended the marriage.”

  Charlotte bent again to reach for the letter, then saw the point in Mabry’s objection and stopped herself. “All right, sir.” She grinned. “It’ll likely take me a good while yet for the full truth to sink in.”

  Mabry said “Thanks. But please don’t abandon this thing she tried to tell you. In fact, while I was married to your mother—in the last three years we spent together—I outright cheated her with several other women and hardly tried to keep it a secret. That was my real crime, and I’ll never deny it—”

  She stopped him too soon. “But isn’t Mother saying she takes an equal share of the blame for your unfaithfulness?”

  Mabry said “Maybe so. What else could she mean? But then she wrote it, or spoke it to Adelaide, after I’d voluntarily turned up and stayed there beside her through her last weeks for right or wrong. Rat that I am, I came back to her with no hope for anything on this Earth but a trace of pardon.”

  As Charlotte sat on, silent, in her tall chair more or less facing her silent father—both of them eating still—her face slowly resumed its true age. So often lately, burdened with the sadness of her mother’s last days and her anger at Mabry’s last-minute return, she’d seemed a woman in her tired mid-thirties. She was twenty-seven, though; and by the time she’d consumed the huge burger and was eating her french fries, slow strand by strand, she began to look even younger still—twenty-four or -five. She almost felt it.

  So Mabry said “Bear with me a second and don’t get mad at an Old Dad question. Are you married now?”

  She waited of course but her face stayed calm, true to its age. “To Malcolm—Malc?”

  He smiled.

  “Do you mean have we gone to some liberal foreign country and got legally wed?”

  Mabry said “Either that or just in both your serious minds. To the best of my knowledge, you’ve lived together ever since your sophomore year at Mount Holyoke.”

  Just the mention of her alma mater, and her mother’s, helped Charlotte laugh now. “I guess you’re saying we’ve proved we’re more than ‘four-year dykes.’”

  Mabry joined her laughter. “Partly that. But maybe you’re ready to go a little further. Do the two of you plan to spend your lives together?”

  That sobered Charlotte’s face. “Of course, we’ve mentioned the possibility. But both of us grew up staring at our parents’ divorces; so maybe we’re more spooked than necessary, by now anyhow. What do you think?”

  God, when did she last ask me for advice—age nine or ten? “I’d say that, given your life expectancy here in the new millennium, there’s no rush whatever for anybody to pledge eternal loyalty.”

  When she’d rolled that over, Charlotte finally said “Don’t forget though—my life expectancy is balanced on the fact that my mother died of double breast cancer; and as of last week, I live in a city that feels as fragile as an ancient dead leaf.”

  Here and now, by way of reflection, that sounded wiser than anything Mabry had to offer. He gave their glasses two additional inches of wine and offered again to toast his daughter. At present she seemed all he had, and a very genuine prop to lean on, thin as she was and lithe as a slat.

  She met his glass with no reluctance.

  So he had to say “Charlotte, I’ll bless any course you take from here on—you and Malcolm and whoever else feels right and worthy to your best mind. Don’t forget you’re your mother’s daughter, Frances Kenyon’s—exceptionally worthy.”

  Charlotte said “Frances Kenyon Kincaid, remember? She never dropped that married last name.”

  “And I never knew whether that was meant as kindness to you and me or something more.”

  Charlotte said “It was love. She loved you, right on.”

  All Mabry could say after that was “Worthy,” then “Worthy” again.

  So Charlotte thanked him from the depths of her heart, real depths. Then she said “You’re bound to be lonely.”

  He wouldn’t deny it.

  “Anybody in s
ight?”

  He waited to wonder. Nobody in New York—Blair Patrick backed out, long since. None in Europe. Not Gwyn Williams, trusty as she is and has always been. “Not a soul. Ain’t I a pitiful broke-down boy?”

  Charlotte stood in place, took a step toward him, then stopped. She said “You’re going through a brief bad patch, I can plainly see that.”

  “You said you’d help me turn that around.” Mabry hated the catch in his voice on turn.

  “I said it and I will.”

  Then it was his moment to thank her, and he managed to say it. Among the several reasons for gratitude, the fact that his eyes could see her clearly in the merciful light from a standing lamp was chief. No picture he’d ever cleaned or touched, no statue he’d stroked, had meant more to him; and now he was free to realize that.

  The Algonquin had the expected physical merits and complications of its age, which was nearly a century. The rooms were small but the walls were thick as any Norman castle’s. Provided no thoughtless guest slammed a hall door, and provided you hung your Do Not Disturb sign on the outside knob, you could sleep right through the day. And Mabry nearly did (he especially enjoyed the recent Spanish version, ¡No Me Moleste!).

  When he finally woke, the bedside clock dimly said eleven-twenty. His first thought was that he’d missed breakfast in the dining room (with another of his old friends from the staff, Chuck, the Turkish Cypriot wrestler). Then he realized what day it was—Tuesday. The catastrophe had struck seven days ago. Would the passing of a week have improved his chances of getting to the loft? Last night Charlotte had thought maybe yes and had given him Malcolm’s cell-phone number at her new job downtown.

  But Malc’s job consisted of sitting in a trailer and meeting the more or less desperate relations of people still missing; so Mabry thought he’d order a room-service breakfast, then see what else might need doing today. The order was under way and he was in the shower before the fear seized him—the fear that burned on the near-edge of terror and was surely natural to a long-term citizen of this vast huddle of human beings, all targets now in a way they’d never quite been before. Why did it take so long to get me? And he didn’t know what he meant by it. What was the it that had got him at last?

  When he’d shaved, eaten his muffins and marmalade, and drunk two cups of the riveting coffee, scalding and black, he was still badly rattled by what he could only identify as fear—not one of the symptoms of whatever plague had ridden him lately, the chance of M.S. And all he could think to do to cool it was face the monster—go straight outside and walk the streets.

  Times Square was fewer than two blocks west of the hotel entrance, and the block between Sixth Avenue and the Square itself seemed entirely unchanged since his last time here. The welfare hotels had silently vanished, and he saw only one or two porno shops with their vaunted live peep shows. But the same swarthy men with enormous bellies, propped on the fenders of cars and engaged in ferocious debate, were thick on the ground. Then he was out in the strong sunlight of Broadway and Forty-fourth; and while the tourist crowd had drastically shrunk, there were still too many people on the sidewalks to make anything resembling a stroll possible. Yet in all the talk he overheard, all the faces he watched as he wove a path uptown, he saw no sign of fear to match his own. If terrorists of any stripe were planning a second assault on the city, wouldn’t this be the site? Television had weighed, again and again in recent days, the likelihood of nuclear or biological weapons next time.

  Before he could think his own way through the question, though, his shoulder was jostled by a man no more than twenty years old—a lean Hispanic with shoulder-length black hair and a laughing boy (red-haired somehow, maybe four years old) astride his neck—and that was all the help Mabry needed, for now at least. He stubbornly chose to walk as far north as Forty-seventh Street, the single block of the diamond district, with its dozens of ultra Orthodox Jews in their black suits, wide-brimmed hats, dangling sidelocks plus a sprinkling of gesturing old men with white beards. If hate-fueled Muslims could strike anywhere, wouldn’t this block be as good a site as any in the Western world? As ever on the block, he failed to catch the eye of a single Jew (their own eyes apparently filtered out goyim); and when he reached Fifth, he turned back south and aimed for the hotel.

  From his father’s house Mabry had tried ten times to phone the superintendent of his building and had got no reply, though a phone seemed to ring. So sitting beneath the large photo of the young Miss Parker (Miss Rothschild in fact, her real maiden name), he called him again now—again no answer. He’d once even had the super’s mother’s number in farthest Rockaway; but when he dialed her now, he got a canned operator’s voice saying no such luck. He called his doctor and made an appointment to come in on Friday. He called three clients for whom he’d been doing small jobs and said he was locked out of his studio now but would phone them the moment he’d found their pieces (he was fully insured). They were all either oddly uninterested or far more eager to reheat the past week’s news than consider the fate of their semi-precious objects. So within an hour he was free again, back in New York with nothing to do—nothing he could do and no one he knew who was eager to see him. Why the hell hadn’t he at least brought Baxter’s picture, to tinker with whatever lay under young Philip Adger’s attempt?

  By then it was nearly three o’clock. Mabry dialed Baxter’s home phone.

  With unnerving speed a man’s voice answered. “Miles Watson speaking.”

  Wait—another changed number? But no, the absence of Baxter’s name had come as a shock, yet the voice was welcome as a mere sign of old life. “Miles, it’s Mabry Kincaid back in town.”

  “Oh Christ, Mr. Kincaid. It’s grand to hear from you.”

  Something had shifted drastically. Miles didn’t sound remotely drunk or out of control in any other way except his words—Christ? grand? In the few days since Mabry had last spoken with him, Miles had gone from being the respectfully muffled butler to the man who managed, if not owned, the place. And when Mabry asked for any news of Mr. Sample, Miles only said “I’m right where I was, sir. I’ve not had a damned word that I haven’t learned from the wireless or the TV or the trips I’ve taken down there at three and four in the morning, scouting the place and airing the dog.”

  “No word from the office?”

  “There’s no more office, just dust on the ground under all the other dust.”

  “And you said Mr. Sample had no known kin?” Grim as the outcome might prove to be, Mabry heard the TV detective in his voice.

  Oddly, Miles took ten seconds for a deep yawn. Had he been caught asleep? “As you know, Mr. Kincaid, he had few friends. But no, he specifically told me more than once that he had no kin and was bloody glad of it.”

  “And no one at all has phoned you or written to ask about Baxter or anything to do with his life or his business?”

  By now Miles had joined Mabry in the strange semi-police exchange. “I’m just telling you the painful facts, sir. Not one soul has rung this residence nor sent a flower, alive or plastic, nor asked if I needed any help at all. Nobody but you, Mr. Kincaid—thanks. Between you and me—and who else is there?—I’ve gone damned nearly mad more than once, not to mention lonelier than any camel at Alice Springs in the blistering Outback a century ago. Mr. Sample was excellent company, as you know.”

  “He was indeed. Look, Miles, could you get to midtown by five o’clock today? I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Miles’s loneliness burst into instant readiness. “I’ll be there on the absolute dot, sir. And thanks in advance.”

  As he’d done with Audrey, for a different reason, Mabry asked Miles to drop the sir.

  Miles said he’d try but reminded Mabry of his military past. “Sir’s drilled into my noggin like nails, no doubt for life.”

  Mabry had hardly set the phone down before he wondered if somehow Miles could bail him out of any oncoming weakness—if he wound up needing steady care, say.

  When he got to the lob
by, the tall grandfather clock said four fifty-eight; but against the far wall, Miles Watson was posted on a sofa almost smaller than he (Miles was long and sturdily broad, not an ounce of fat). When he saw Mabry coming toward him, he unfolded upright—maybe six foot six—and extended a hand, no smile yet on his square brown face.

  Big as Miles was, he was younger than he looked; and while Mabry was sure bad Australians existed, he’d never met one he didn’t like, though some were rough-hewn in a fashion unlike any brand of American roughness he’d known. This young man was plainly in trouble, here and now. So with more confidence than usual, Mabry took the nearest chair, firmly staking a dim corner of the crowded lobby (not as crowded as usual, especially on weekends when its dozens of well-dressed but clandestine couples seemed to earn it the affectionate name that a friend of Mabry’s had given it decades ago—the Adultery Lounge).

  An hour later, he’d learned full details of what he’d hardly considered in the past week—how this young man had felt, alone in both a foreign country and in an employer’s spacious and handsomely furnished duplex with the growing certainty that his employer was dead and had left no kin, nor even so much as a memorandum of instructions in the likelihood of any such occurrence. As the second round of drinks arrived—and neither Miles nor Mabry was a guzzler—Miles reached inside his double-breasted blazer and produced a white envelope. Carefully he drew out a four-by-six white card, which he examined for half a minute before handing it over to Mabry.

  At once Mabry recognized Baxter Sample’s script, the ideal hand for an honest lawyer—upright, assertive (though not aggressive), and legible in every particular. In an arrangement that seemed almost a poem in intent, it said—

  FORTONIGHT

  A cold soup

  A curry (you choose: maybe chicken or entirely meatless—say, eggplant?)